Authors: Lynda La Plante
CHAPTER
Lorraine was woken by a shaft of sunlight, diffused and softened by the gathered muslin curtains, coming through the doorway to the bathroom and the balcony beyond. For ^moment she was unsure where she was until she saw Robert Caley, alreHy showered and shaved.
“What time is it?”
she murmured.
“Seven.”
He walked to the closets, just a small towel around his waist, and selected a shirt, suit and tie, tossing them onto an elegant spoonback chair. Lorraine sat up and blinked. He turned and smiled.
“When you sleep you look like a ten-year-old, but for that scar. How in God’s name did you get it?”
Lorraine drew the sheet around herself.
“Oh, some bar someplace. I’d better get back to my room.”
“No hurry. You want me to order some breakfast?”
Lorraine squinted up at him.
“You think that’s wise?”
He laughed, dropping the towel to pull on his briefs; he was cornpletely relaxed about his nudity.
“Maybe not, but you can call from your room, then we can eat together.”
She sat up, watching him pull on his trousers.
“I have a meeting, ten o’clock.” Lorraine swung her legs from the bed and he came toward her, bending down to kiss the top of her head. He leaned over and traced the scars on her back, then on her arms.
“How did they all happen?”
Lorraine drew away from him.
“Well, at some point I didn’t care too much about living. They’re the self-inflicted ones, the others
“
He cupped her face in his hands.
“Wherever you’ve been, my darlin’, is past. You’re with me now.”
She looked up into his face, trying to figure him out.
“I was there, though, Robertlike it or not, I was a drunkard.”
He kissed her, holding her tightly.
“But you’re not now. You’re my lovely Lorraine, and last night is one I will remember for a long time.”
“Me too,”
she said softly, wishing he would get back in the wide sleigh bed again, wanting to hold him naked, wanting him to make love to her again. For a moment she felt that he wanted it too, but his phone rang and he eased away from her to answer it.
“Hi, Phyllis. No, no, I’m already dressed. How is she?”
Lorraine picked up her robe from the floor and slipped it around her shoulders. He had his back to her.
“She is? That’s good. Well, tell her I’ll call later.”
He turned to face Lorraine as he pressed line 2 to pick up a waiting call.
“It’s Phyllis, says Elizabeth is fine, maybe another week.”
He returned to his call, his manner changed.
“When? It was set for eight this morning … what? Shit, okay, no, I can make it. Call him back and tell him I’ll be there, and thanks, Mark.”
He replaced the receiver and sighed.
“Lloyd Dulay wants me to meet him at his place, so I’m going to have to move fast. Will you leave me the number of your hotel so I can call you?”
She nodded. He finished dressing and put on his shades.
“Talk to you later.”
He kissed her cheek and closed the door behind him.
Back in her own suite, Lorraine sat on the balcony. What the hell did she think she was doing? She must have been out of her mind; no matter what the night had been, or meant, she couldn’t help feeling depressed and listless. She called down for a pot of hot, strong black coffee, and drained three cups and smoked two cigarettes before getting ready to leave.
Lorraine walked back into Robert Caley’s suite. To her surprise it had already been cleaned and the bed made up. There was no indication of their night together: it was as if it had never happened. She crossed to the escritoire to leave her hotel and phone number, pulled the lid down to write, and then saw a stack of documents left neatly in order and a file with
CASINO DEVELOPMENT printed on it. She wondered if Caley had forgotten it in his hurry to make the meeting; she opened the cover and saw the site for the proposed casino underlined three times: the Rivergate Convention Center.
Lorraine picked up the file and returned to her own suite. She began jotting down notes. Some of the information blew her mind. Two hundred thousand square feet of gaming area, two hundred tables, six thousand slot machines and a projected five and a half million annual customers. Lorraine was filling up the pages, salaries estimated at $107 million. The sources of funding listed were as mind-blowing: $170 million equity, almost $500 million in bonds, a further $140 million bank credit, and on it went to mount up, the grand total well in excess of $800 million. The document listed the hard costs, including the parking structures, gaming equipment, state taxes, city taxes, interest, cash load preopening, finishing fees and expenses. She noted that the expenditures totaled as much, if not more, than the sources. Finally listed was the projection of revenue, ending up with a profit margin target of around $120 million.
Detailed on the following pages were the proposals of what seemed to be the rival consortium, Doubloons, consisting of nine Louisiana residents, nine wealthy men clearly eager to make themselves even wealthier; no wonder Caley was so strung out about whether he or they would be awarded the concession. Lorraine noticed that the costs in excess of $40 million had been incurred in securing leases on the site where the casino was to be completed, and wondered if Caley ha Aorne all of these himself. If he had, then he not only must be very wMlthy but, as he himself had implied, was stretching himself to the very limit too.
Lorraine returned the file to his room and could not resist opening up every drawer in the desk. She found his real estate license, his New Orleans office address, details of new hotel developments, mostly in the riverfront area, and one of the hotels that was jointly owned by both Robert and Elizabeth Caley. Contrary to what he had said about his wife’s having nothing to do with his business, her name appeared on numerous deeds. But most shocking to Lorraine was a folded document in the name of Anna Louise Caley. It was secured with a seal and a red ribbon, and contained details of Anna Louise’s trust fund. Using the letter opener, warming it over her lighter, Lorraine worked on easing the seal up without breaking it until it came away from the paper. The thick yellowpapered deed was deeply creased and brittle and she opened it with care. She gasped: there had never been a mention at any time, verbally or in any statement she had seen, of a trust fund for Anna Louise Caley, and the amount was a staggering $100 million. The trust fund was to be managed by her parents until Anna Louise became twentyone, and should she fail to live to that age, then the fund would automatically revert to Elizabeth Caley.
Rooney had put on a suit he hadn’t worn in a while, and had been surprised that it fitted him, but those few pounds he had lost had made him look and feel better.
“My, you look snazzy,”
Rosie remarked as he walked into the restaurant across the street from the St. Marie, and he flushed.
“Remember our deal? No diets while we’re here.”
“Sure, and I’m gamewhile we’re here, we can eat anything we like.”
Rooney clapped his hands and grinned.
“Right, let’s go, they got pancakes here that are delicious, and Nick and Lorraine will be down in a second.”
Hungover, dressed in the clothes he had slept in, dark shades on, Nick listened as Lorraine recounted her findings. Watching Rosie and Rooney eating pancakes with syrup, Lorraine realized she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten anything since dinner on Caley’s private plane. She ordered scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, which made Nick feel even more ill.
“How did you get your hands on all this?”
Rooney asked with his mouth full.
“I stayed at the same hotel, in the same room Anna Louise disappeared from. When I went in to thank Mr. Caley, he had already left.”
“Went in?”
Nick asked.
“Yeah, there was a connecting door, I had the key. Caley had a breakfast meeting with Lloyd Dulay.”
Nick poured himself more coffee.
“So you stayed in the room next to Caley’s?”
Lorraine nodded.
“Yep. I questioned the staff, which was the reason I accepted his offer, so quit with the snide remarks, Bartello. What is that shit you got around your neck?”
“It’s a grisgris.”
He leaned close to Lorraine.
“What’s that on your neck, sweetheart? Get bitten in that fancy hotel, did you?”
Before Lorraine could answer, Nick took off, and she inched up her collar.
“Mosquito bite. I must have given one little bastard a real night out.”
“I’ll give you something for it,”
Rosie said at once. She had brought a first-aid kit with every conceivable thing they could require.
“It’s nothing, just forget it.”
Rooney was scratching his ankle, now sure he had been bitten by something too. **”
“I think the same little bastard just got me. Heat’s like a blanket an’ still only January. What this place must be like in the peak of summer, God only knows.”
“Well, hopefully we won’t be here more’n a few days,”
Lorraine said, a little sharp, as she was not getting much response from anyone to her findings. In fact, they seemed to accept it all, as if they knew it already Robert Caley was still their number one suspect!
“I’m out of here, see you laterwe’ll meet up in my room. It makes me feel like Snow White or something, by the way, Rosieit’s got about five beds.”
Rosie was getting rattled by all the complaints about their hotel rooms.
“Listen, if you think you can do better, go ahead, but it’s Mardi Gras, there wasn’t much choice.”
“Don’t get pissed, I was just mentioning it.”
Rooney sniffed.
“If we get short of cash, we can all bunk in together or maybe make a few bucks rentin’ them out. You want some more coffee?”
Lorraine drained her cup and nodded.
“I’ll be right beck.”
She set off toward the restroom, and Rooney signaled to the waitress to order a fresh pot of coffee.
“Where’s Nick?”
f-
“Getting cleaned up, I don’t know,”
said Rmie, still irritated.
“What’s the matter with everyone this morning?”
Rooney asked, puzzled.
“I was in a perfectly good mood when I came down for breakfast,”
Rosie snapped back.
“Now, don’t get all steamed up about Lorraine. We’ve all mentioned that we got enough beds for a basketball team.”
Rosie banged the table.
“Well, we can check out, one of you can try to find accommodation that can take all four of us at the same time. I spent enough time trying to get the best deal I could, but not so much as a thankyouit makes me sick.”
Rooney reached over and patted her hand.
“Come on now, no one minds, and you never know, one of us might get lucky.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
she glowered.
“Have a few friends call in! Just a joke^sweetheart.”
“Well, I don’t find it funny, it undermines my confidence. You might all have been doing this investigation work a long time, but I haven’t, and you make me feel inadequate.”
“Then I’m sorry, Rosie, but, you know, you could take it as a complimentcops always get at each other, joke around, it’s the way we interact. Treat you any different and you should worry.”
She flushed and suddenly smiled.
“That right?”
“Sure. Now, did you want another coffee?”
Rosie nodded.
She felt a lot betterin fact, she always did when she was with Rooney. He was restoring her confidence, especially as a woman, in more ways than she had ever hoped possible.
At the turn of the century the Dulay home, an amalgam of Victorian gothic turrets and towers and an incongruously Mediterranean-looking front portico, might have been thought a vulgar, ostentatious hybrid, but it had cost a king’s ransom to build, and Lloyd liked to let people know that there was nothing shabby-genteel about his family; they had had money then, and they had money now.
Robert Caley drove along the allee of specially trained oaks through Lloyd’s extensive groundsthe formal garden, the wilderness garden, the kitchen garden, the cut-flower garden, the water gardenwhich the Dulays had laid out on several acres of prime site near the agreeable cool of parks and country clubs between river and lake shores, and which glowed like green velvet even when every other yard of ground in the state was a bleached gray-brown. He rang the door, and a uniformed maid ushered him past several waist-high bronzes of the Dulays’ favorite dogs and horses into the breakfast room. Caley never ceased to marvel at both the crassness of Lloyd’s taste and the boldness of its execution: the modeling of plaster-and woodwork throughout the house was overall heavy, and Lloyd had decided to offset the darkness of the breakfast room’s paneled ceilings by commissioning modern murals around the walls, in which neoclassical nymphs and satyrs peeped through more thick foliage. There was something lascivious in the painting, and Caley wondered whether the young Creole goddess, attired in French maid’s costume and at this moment pouring coffee at the mahogany table, might perhaps have been the inspiration for one of the voluptuous nudes to which she bore a striking resemblance.
There was only one place setting at the table, where Georgian silvercovered dishes faced a large, abstract sculpture in colored Perspex, which served as an epergne: Lloyd fancied himself a collector of modern art, but
his reforming zeal had not yet encompassed the two hundred feet of glazed chintz fussily swagged, draped and festooned across the room’s huge picture windows by his grandmother, nor the fifty pounds of early Anglo-Irish glass hanging from the ceiling, the chandelier’s enormous pendants almost touching the plastic structure beneath. The effect was grotesque.
“Just coffee,”
Caley said, and the maid acknowledged him with only the smallest of nods of her beautiful head with its wide cheekbones, pale coffee-colored skin, delicate nose and large, slanting almond eyes.
The heavy door burst open and Lloyd Dulay strode in. He stood at six feet three and, despite being in his seventies, ramrod-straight, his shock of white hair combed back from his high forehead. He was a formidable man, and beside him Caley felt small in comparison.